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Originally Posted by Villages Kahuna
My own health insurance is much the same as your own. I had major surgery in late April and my hotel bill for my wife staying in downtown Chicago while I was in the hospital was more than my deductible and co-pays for the procedure. It works well for me. I would be perfectly justified in saying, "don't change a thing in my behalf--I'm just fine, thank you very much".
But what about the people who don't qualify for Medicare (the "single payer government system" that many say will be the death knell for American healthcare)? I've read statistics that 14,000 people per day are losing their health insurance because their employers are discontinuing medial insurance as a fringe benefit. The premiums have escalated beyond the point where the employer can afford to pay them.
And the illegal immigrants, of course. The lobbyists have been quite effective in gutting any proposed immigration reforms because employers want and like the cheap labor provided by those crossing our borders illegally. We all know that even the illegals can get emergency care for nothing. It's not really "nothing". of course. The costs get shifted eventually to those that are paying insurance premiums, like the employers who can no longer afford to do so. By the way, would anyone disagree that this is really a "transfer of wealth"?
What a Catch 22. The critical problem is fast becoming grave. Fewer and fewer people have reasonable healthcare coverage. And the lobbyists are hard at work making sure that it stays that way--or gets worse.
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And this is indeed a major problem, if not THE major problem affecting everything else. WHY are these employers reducing health benefits? The answer is the simple one we all kn ow - employers have to compete and employee compensation (wages, benefits, taxes and employer-required insurances for unemployment, etc) are a cost to be considered. Employers are reducing employee compensation costs wherever possible, and in the trade-off of wages versus benefits (the rest are 'stuck' costs), employees (when polled) would rather have a slice in benefits rather thas a smaller wage amount.
So, how do we make it possible for employers to compete, and who are they competing against? That's an economic - not a health care - question, and when answered and the fix put in place, health care for employees solves itself.
Even with a government-run single-payer system, the moneys for it come from what an employer has in his/her employee compensation costs. That amount is fixed, and the pieces that make it up are variable. Making employers pay a fixed number just reduces something else, and 'that net amount an employee takes home is the variable that will suffer. Anyone who believes the employee will gain in the end has never run a business.